Thailand

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to their increasing utilization in Chinese K-12 education. Despite the growing integration of LLMs and education, the absence of a dedicated benchmark for evaluating LLMs within this domain presents a pressing concern. Consequently, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive natural language processing benchmark to precisely assess the capabilities of various LLMs in Chinese K-12 education. In response, we introduce E-EVAL, the first comprehensive evaluation benchmark specifically tailored for Chinese K-12 education. E-EVAL comprises 4,351 multiple-choice questions spanning primary, middle, and high school levels, covering a diverse array of subjects. Through meticulous evaluation, we find that Chinese-dominant models often outperform English-dominant ones, with many exceeding GPT 4.0. However, most struggle with complex subjects like mathematics. Additionally, our analysis indicates that most Chinese-dominant LLMs do not achieve higher scores at the primary school level compared to the middle school level, highlighting the nuanced relationship between proficiency in higher-order and lower-order knowledge domains. Furthermore, experimental results highlight the effectiveness of the Chain of Thought (CoT) technique in scientific subjects and Few-shot prompting in liberal arts. Through E-EVAL, we aim to conduct a rigorous analysis delineating the strengths and limitations of LLMs in educational applications, thereby contributing significantly to the advancement of Chinese K-12 education and LLMs.

ACL 2024

E-EVAL: A Comprehensive Chinese K-12 Education Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

chinese k-12 education

evaluation benchmark

large language models

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

poster

Large language models (LLMs) have manifested strong ability to generate codes for productive activities. However, current benchmarks for code synthesis, such as HumanEval, MBPP, and DS-1000, are predominantly oriented towards introductory tasks on algorithm and data science, insufficiently satisfying challenging requirements prevalent in real-world coding. To fill this gap, we propose NaturalCodeBench (NCB), a challenging code benchmark designed to mirror the complexity and variety of scenarios in real coding tasks. 
NCB comprises 402 high-quality problems in Python and Java, meticulously selected from natural user queries from online coding services, covering 6 different domains. Noting the extraordinary difficulty in creating testing cases for real-world queries, we also introduce a semi-automated pipeline to enhance the efficiency of test case construction. Comparing with manual solutions, it achieves an efficiency increase of more than 4 times. Our systematic experiments on 39 LLMs find that performance gaps on NCB between models with close HumanEval scores could still be significant, indicating a lack of focus on practical code synthesis scenarios or over-specified optimization on HumanEval. On the other hand, even the best-performing GPT-4 is still far from satisfying on NCB. The evaluation toolkit and development set are available at https://github.com/THUDM/NaturalCodeBench.

NaturalCodeBench: Examining Coding Performance Mismatch on HumanEval and Natural User Queries

Initially introduced as a machine translation model, the Transformer architecture has now become the foundation for modern deep learning architecture, with applications in a wide range of fields, from computer vision to natural language processing. Nowadays, to tackle increasingly more complex tasks, Transformer-based models are stretched to enormous sizes, requiring increasingly larger training datasets, and unsustainable amount of compute resources. The ubiquitous nature of the Transformer and its core component, the attention mechanism, are thus prime targets for efficiency research.
In this work, we propose an alternative compatibility function for the self-attention mechanism introduced by the Transformer architecture. This compatibility function exploits an overlap in the learned representation of the traditional scaled dot-product attention, leading to a symmetric with pairwise coefficient dot-product attention. When applied to the pre-training of BERT-like models, this new symmetric attention mechanism reaches a score of 79.36 on the GLUE benchmark against 78.74 for the traditional implementation, leads to a reduction of 6% in the number of trainable parameters, and reduces the number of training steps required before convergence by half.

Symmetric Dot-Product Attention for Efficient Training of BERT Language Models

To democratize large language models (LLMs) to most natural languages, it is imperative to make these models capable of understanding and generating texts in many languages, in particular low-resource ones. While recent multilingual LLMs demonstrate remarkable performance in such capabilities, these LLMs still support a limited number of human languages due to the lack of training data for low resource languages. Moreover, these LLMs are not yet aligned with human preference for downstream tasks, which is crucial for the success of LLMs in English. In this paper, we introduce xLLaMA-100 and xBLOOM-100 (collectively xLLMs-100), which scale the multilingual capabilities of LLaMA and BLOOM to 100 languages. To do so, we construct two datasets: a multilingual instruction dataset including 100 languages, which represents the largest language coverage to date, and a cross-lingual human feedback dataset encompassing 30 languages. We perform multilingual instruction tuning on the constructed instruction data and further align the LLMs with human feedback using the DPO algorithm on our cross-lingual human feedback dataset. We evaluate the multilingual understanding and generating capabilities of xLLMs-100 on five multilingual benchmarks. Experimental results show that xLLMs-100 consistently outperforms its peers across the benchmarks by considerable margins, defining a new state-of-the-art multilingual LLM that supports 100 languages.

LLMs Beyond English: Scaling the Multilingual Capability of LLMs with Cross-Lingual Feedback

In this study, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Jubensha, a Chinese detective role-playing game and a novel area in Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven gaming. We introduce the first dataset specifically for Jubensha, including character scripts and game rules, to foster AI agent development in this complex narrative environment. Our work also presents a unique multi-agent interaction framework using LLMs, allowing AI agents to autonomously engage in Jubensha games. To evaluate the gaming performance of these AI agents, we developed novel methods measuring their mastery of case information and reasoning skills. Furthermore, we incorporated the latest advancements in prompting engineering to enhance the agents' performance in information gathering, murderer identification, and logical reasoning. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. This work aims to offer a novel perspective on understanding LLM capabilities and establish a new benchmark for evaluating large language model-based agents.

Deciphering Digital Detectives: Understanding LLM Behaviors and Capabilities in Multi-Agent Mystery Games

Task embedding, a meta-learning technique that captures task-specific information, has gained popularity, especially in areas such as multi-task learning, model editing, and interpretability. However, it faces challenges with the emergence of prompt-guided Large Language Models (LLMs) operating in a gradient-free manner. Existing task embedding methods rely on fine-tuned, task-specific language models, which hinders the adaptability of task embeddings across diverse models, especially prompt-based LLMs. To hardness the potential of task embeddings in the era of LLMs, we propose a framework for unified task embeddings (FUTE), harmonizing task embeddings from various models, including smaller language models and LLMs with varied prompts, within a single vector space. Such uniformity enables comparison and analysis of similarities amongst different models, broadening the scope and utility of existing task embedding methods in multi-model scenarios, while maintaining their performance comparable to architecture-specific methods.

Towards Unified Task Embeddings Across Multiple Models: Bridging the Gap for Prompt-Based Large Language Models and Beyond

In light of recent advances in large language models (LLMs), the expectations for the next generation of virtual assistants include enhanced naturalness and adaptability across diverse usage scenarios. However, the creation of high-quality annotated data for Task-Oriented Dialog~(TOD) is recognized to be slow and costly. To address these challenges, we introduce Task-Oriented Automatic Dialogs (TOAD), a novel and scalable TOD dataset along with its automatic generation pipeline. The TOAD dataset simulates realistic app context interaction and provide a variety of system response style options. Two aspects of system response styles are considered, verbosity level and users' expression mirroring. We benchmark TOAD on two response generation tasks, and the results show that modeling more verbose responses or responses without user expression mirroring is more challenging.

TOAD: Task-Oriented Automatic Dialogs with Diverse Response Styles

Open Information Extraction (OIE) is a field of natural language processing that aims to present textual information in a format that allows it to be organized, analyzed and reflected upon. Numerous OIE systems are developed, claiming ever-increasing performance, marking the need for objective benchmarks. BenchIE is the latest reference we know of. Despite being very well thought out, we noticed a number of issues we believe are limiting. Therefore, we propose BenchIE^FL, a new OIE benchmark which fully enforces the principles of BenchIE while containing fewer errors, omissions and shortcomings when candidate facts are matched towards reference ones. BenchIE^FL allows insightful conclusions to be drawn on the actual performance of OIE extractors.

BenchIE^FL: A Manually Re-Annotated Fact-Based Open Information Extraction Benchmark

Code LLMs have the potential to make it easier for non-experts to understand and write code. However, current CodeLLM benchmarks rely on a single expert-written prompt per problem, making it hard to generalize their success to non-expert users. In this paper, we present a new natural-language-to-code benchmark of prompts written by a key population of non-experts: beginning programmers. StudentEval contains 1,749 prompts written by 80 students who have only completed one introductory Python course. StudentEval contains numerous non-expert prompts describing the same problem, enabling exploration of key factors in prompt success. We use StudentEval to evaluate 12 Code LLMs and find that StudentEval is a better discriminator of model performance than existing benchmarks. Our analysis of student prompting strategies reveals that nondeterministic LLM sampling can mislead students about the quality of their descriptions, a finding with key implications for Code LLMs in education.

StudentEval: A Benchmark of Student-Written Prompts for Large Language Models of Code

One of the most important challenges in text generation systems is to produce outputs that are not only correct but also diverse.
Recently, Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding has gained prominence for generating sentences of the highest quality among the decoding algorithms. 
However, existing algorithms proposed to generate diverse outputs are predominantly based on beam search or random sampling, thus their output quality is capped by these underlying decoding algorithms. 
In this paper, we investigate an alternative approach -- we develop diversity-promoting decoding algorithms by enforcing diversity objectives to MBR decoding.
We propose two variants of MBR; (i) Diverse MBR (DMBR) that adds a diversity penalty to the decoding objective and (ii) $k$-medoids MBR (KMBR) that reformulates the decoding task as a clustering problem.
We evaluate DMBR and KMBR on a variety of directed text generation tasks using encoder-decoder models and a language model with prompting. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a better trade-off than the diverse beam search and sampling algorithms overall.

Generating Diverse and High-Quality Texts by Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding

Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding is shown to be a powerful alternative to beam search decoding for a wide range of text generation tasks. However, MBR requires a huge amount of time for inference to compute the MBR objective, which makes the method infeasible in many situations where response time is critical. Confidence-based pruning (CBP) (Cheng and Vlachos, 2023) has recently been proposed to reduce the inference time in machine translation tasks. Although it is shown to significantly reduce the amount of computation, it requires hyperparameter tuning using a development set to be effective. To this end, we propose Adaptive Minimum Bayes-Risk (AMBR) decoding, a hyperparameter-free method to run MBR decoding efficiently. AMBR is derived from the observation that the problem of computing the sample-based MBR objective is the medoid identification problem. AMBR uses the Correlated Sequential Halving (CSH) algorithm (Baharav and Tse, 2019), the algorithm with the best performance guarantee to date for the medoid identification problem, to compute the sample-based MBR objective. We evaluate AMBR on machine translation, text summarization, and image captioning tasks. The results show that AMBR achieves on par with CBP, with CBP selecting hyperparameters through an Oracle for each given computation budget.

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NaturalCodeBench: Examining Coding Performance Mismatch on HumanEval and Natural User Queries

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